Wednesday, October 5, 2016

He wanted a quilt that was 'darkish colours with the convict broad arrow symbol'.

(The broad arrow is the symbol of his unit)

Since I started sewing to AHQ, I have sewn words or messages into the quilts. These are the messages sewn into this one. Can you tell what they say? (The quilting is is variegated thread, so it sort of occasionally dissapears)

This quilt is super simple in design, but I really like how the colours came together.

I hope he likes it, but more importantly he knows that someone in Australia appreciates what he is doing for our country.

This finish was one of those projects that has sat around for not particular reason.

I had a deadline... so it got finished (only took about 12 months)

This cushion belonged to a friend and the original cushion was eaten by the washing machine - the grey fabric behind the dog was melted int he washing machine & the cushion un-usable.

So I offered to fix it. It was about a 1 hour job including stuffing and stitching closed & there was no reason for it to just 'sit around'. Luckily I was going to a wedding with the cushion owner, so it was good motivation to finish it and deliver in person.

Thankfully I was able to rescue a panel from the cushion to applique to a new cushion.

Tuesday, October 4, 2016

Well September was a month of deadlines for me and with 2 weeks of school holidays & impending travel, I had to be organised.

This Aussie Hero Quilt & Laundry Bag are for a "Wallabies" lover. He is also part of 7RAR and their mascot is a pig, so I appliqued a pig to one side of his laundry bag and a Wallabies logo to the other.

His quilt was loaded onto my trusty quilting frame and O-me and I got to work.

(On a side note, I love that Wallabies fabric in the middle of the quilt - it is from 2 doona covers I purchased a couple of years ago. I will be very sad once it is all gone)

And as usual. Messages were stitched into the quilt.

We took this quilt to the nursery for a photo shoot too. Here is is being quality controlled by a couple of corrugated horses.

Monday, October 3, 2016

I missed the end of September / 1 October due to a wedding and here it is the 3rd October already.

I have sewn this month. Sewn a bit actually 4 finishes.

So here goes #1 of 4

Ryan & Rachel's Wedding quilt. Like all good quilts, a labour of love. Unlike many quilts I make a surprising challenge.

The bride requested navy & white. Now these guys live on a farm with lovely RED dirt, so you can understand why I was worried about white. But I got over that after I got the design together.

The quilt started out at 9 x 10" squares across & down.

I laid it out on my bed & hated it, so we played with some other ideas.

Maybe adding smaller blocks between the 10" blocks?? - NO too busy.

The thought what about smaller blocks? Ahhh, much more pleasing to the eye.

Mathematically much more sewing.

The quilt went from being 100 nine inch squares

to 421 four & a half inch squares.

That is a huge psychological difference.

However I have recently learnt how to 'web' quilts together, so it was joined in a matter of hours (6 approximately)

Before I could quilt I realised my backing was rather scrunched up so I had to work out how to iron the 2.75m2 piece of material. Thankfully my bed doubles as a great ironing board. A bit low, but very helpful in this case.

Next up was quilting. After giving O-me a good talking too, I decided on an allover swirl with loop design within each 4.5" row.

I was posting sneaky shots on my Facebook page and didn't want the bride to see too much, so I posted the 'sketch' image. She had no idea. (The 3rd photo is "the last stitch")

I like to quilt messages into my quilt. So in the squares near the bottom right corner I quilted...

HI
Welcome Outback Crafter.
I began blogging so I would keep track of my creations, sometimes this works, sometimes not.
I sell some of my creations under the name of Dabble Handmade as I tend to 'dabble' in different crafts.
I hope you enjoy what you see.
Enjoy your time here.